Description is explication.
And:
What is description, after all, but encoded desire?
Might, then, explication aim at possessing what one desires?
Take Persona.
Darkness.
A film projector, its bulb molten.
A blinding light. Think of that – a light that blinds: that which should take us out of darkness places us in it.
The film through the projector staggers, pauses, scratched and uncertain – as if it has lost its way.
Inexorably, the ribbon of film rattles through the projector. It travels at considerable speed. 24 frames per second. 27 long meters a minute. The shadows run over the white wall. Magic, of course. But unusually sober and merciless magic. Nothing can be changed, undone. It all thunders forth again and again. Always with the same cold immutable willingness…Load the film upside-down or back-to-front, the result will not be very different.
A second – no more – of an erect penis – whose? A flash! (See its sons in Mullholland Dr. and Fight Club - films similarly obsessed by doubling identities, death and how a tale is told and by whom).
Two hands gesture frantically – or speak to us in sign language – which?
A white screen.
In the right hand corner, a silent movie, a slapstick comedy: a Ben Turpin figure in a white nightgown is surprised by death, a man in black from head to toe, a skeleton painted on his body. A nightmare chase around the room until he tumbles into bed.
A spider.
A sheep’s head held in an old man’s hands. Its throat is cut. Black blood floods from the slit.
The sheep’s eye: it gaze holds us.
The murderous hands, filled with the sheep’s offal, its heart.
A nail driven into the palm of a hand: the hand winces and curls towards the nails.
Church bells. Winter trees. Railings, sharply pointed. Snow, in heaps, dirtied.
An old woman’s chin, her lips. Her face. She is sleeping – or dead.
A young boy lies on a gurney, another corpse?
More old and dead, their wrinkled faces, their curled hands, their patient feet. Water drips and a phone rings and rings, unanswered.
The young boy again. He is not a corpse. The gurney is a bed. Restless and unsleeping, he twists the sheet about his body as he turns. He puts on round, thick-lensed spectacles, and begins to read: Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time.
The water continues to drip, but the music rises, a sinister creep of sound. The boy looks up, around.
He stares - at us? He raises his hand.
He reaches out to strokes a woman’s face, giant-sized on a screen, a blur of a face that sharpens into another woman’s face and then back again to the first woman. Back and forth, back and forth, this blurred exchange of faces. The boy caresses each one, lovingly and without discrimination.
The Title and Credits on a white screen, intercut, a rapid exchange, with the boy’s face, the two women’s faces, a lake, the sea, a burning monk, a Keystone cop chasing a criminal.
Prologue over – dream over - whose? - the story begins.
A white door in a white wall opens and a nurse steps into the room.
An unseen doctor tells the nurse is to look after a young woman, an actress who, in the middle of a performance as Electra, has become an elective mute.
The nurse, recognising the strength of character the patient’s dedicated silence indicates, wonders if she herself will cope with the challenge – ‘mentally,’ she adds.
The nurse is dedicated to the ordinary and to the known. Her future - marriage, children - is all decided ‘within her.’
Elsewhere, Vietnam, a war is occurring. On TV, a monk burns in the street. The patient watches, unblinking.
The doctor tells the patient that she is lost in the hopeless dream of being.
The hopeless dream of being. Not seeming, but being, in every waking moment aware, alert. The tug of war... what you are with others and who you really are. A feeling of vertigo and a constant hunger to be finally exposed. To be seen through, cut down...even obliterated. Every tone of voice a lie. Every gesture false. Every smile a grimace. Commit suicide? That's unthinkable. You don't do things like that. But you can refuse to move and be silent. Then, at least, you're not lying. You can shut yourself in, shut out the world. Then you don't have to play any roles, show any faces, make false gestures. You'd think so... ...but reality is diabolical. Your hiding-place isn't watertight. Life trickles in everywhere. You're forced to react. Nobody asks if it's real or not, if you're honest or a liar. That’s only important at the theatre, perhaps not even there. Elisabet, I understand why you're silent, why you don't move. Your lifelessness has become a fantastic part. I understand and I admire you. I think you should play this part until it's done...until it's no longer interesting. Then you can leave it, as you leave all your roles.
I first saw Bergman’s Persona when I couldn’t have been more than barely adolescent. I saw it on TV – it must have been BBC 2 – in those days when there were only three channels, and that seemed sufficient; not only that, the narrow choice meant that mostly we all watched the same programmes, and, so, the next morning, we could talk about it from shared experience. There was less to choose from, but the diet seemed richer.
I still remember watching Donskoi’s Childhood, which I have never seen since, and Truffaut’s La Sirene de Mississippi and Citizen Kane – and my sister explaining the sled was called Rosebud: I’d not noticed the sled at all.
And these weren’t watched out of any precocious desire, but part of watching TV. The experiences were mixed up and no different in impact than Emergency Ward 10, Coronation Street, Blue Peter and Magpie. Truly, in those days of elitist broadcasting, our consumption was a more post-modern mix than the many ghetto channels afford us now.
The age of the cineaste is gone and these films struggle to earn attention. In 1952, Donskoi's film was listed as one of Sight and Sound’s Top Ten. Donskoi’s Childhood is not available on DVD in the UK. There is a Region 1 copy on Amazon 2 : new from £48.94 and 1 used from £69.54. But this, more cheaply, is a glimpse of it:
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